Technology leader with over 20 years experience, primarily in storage. Created the first open source NAS (network attached storage) stack, the first unified block/file storage stack for Linux, the first storage management software, and the list goes on.

Since 2012, I have been heavily involved in NFV (Network Functions Virtualization). I wrote a bunch of the standards and was editor for the Compute/Storage Domain in the Infrastructure Working Group for NFV. And then I started up the open source effort to close the gaps for achieving our vision of the NFVI. This was the precursor to OPNFV.

The best way to understand what I do is to imagine being a high-level marketing exec who comes up with a whiz bang product and business idea, including business plan, competitive analysis, MRD, everything, but now comes the hand-off with your engineering organization, only to hear a litany of nos. Well, I got tired of being told “No, it can’t be done” or “No, we don’t know how to do it”, so I started doing it myself. I call this skill “Rapid Prototyping”, and over the years I have found it to be a very missing gap in the product development process. When Marketing comes up with ideas, we need a way to very efficiently validate the technology and business concepts before we commit to a lengthy engineering cycle.

I’m just one person, working in a company of over 180,000 people and in a very dynamic industry. My ability to get creative and to influence businesses is never a dull moment; and I will probably be 100 years old and still writing open source software.

GKE solve end user experience and operational challenges to deliver it

26 min 07 sec: Edge IT replaces what is On-Premises IT

Bullish on the future with Edge computing

27 min 27 sec: Who delivers control plane for edge?

Recommends Open Source in control plan

28 min 29 sec: Current tech hides the infrastructure problems

Someone still has to deal with the physical hardware

30 min 53 sec: Commercial driver for rapid Edge adoption

32 min 20 sec: CloudOps building software / next generation of BSS or OSS for telco

Meet the needs of the cloud provider for flexibility in generating services with the ability to change the service backend provider

Amazon is the new Win32

38 min 07 sec: Can customers install their own software? Will people buy software anymore?

Compare payment models from Salesforce and Slack

Google allowing customers to run their technology themselves of allow Google to manage it for you

40 min 43 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest: Ian Rae, CEO and Founder CloudOps

Ian Rae is the founder and CEO of CloudOps, a cloud computing consulting firm that provides multi-cloud solutions for software companies, enterprises and telecommunications providers. Ian is also the founder of cloud.ca, a Canadian cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) focused on data residency, privacy and security requirements. He is a partner at Year One Labs, a lean startup incubator, and is the founder of the Centre cloud.ca in Montreal. Prior to clouds, Ian was responsible for engineering at Coradiant, a leader in application performance management.

The 2018 Vancouver OpenStack Summit is very focused on IT infrastructure at the Edge. It’s a fitting topic considering the telcos’ embrace for the project; however, building the highly distributed, small footprint management needed for these environments is very different than OpenStack’s architectural priorities. There is a significant risk that the community’s bias towards it’s current code base (which still has work needed to service hyper-scale and enterprise data centers) will undermine progress in building suitable Edge IT solutions.

There are five significant ways that Edge is different than “traditional” datacenter. We often discuss this on our L8istSh9y podcast and it’s time to summarize them in a blog post.

The 2018 Vancouver OpenStack Summit is very focused on IT infrastructure at the Edge. It’s a fitting topic considering the telcos’ embrace for the project; however, building the highly distributed, small footprint management needed for these environments is very different than OpenStack’s architectural priorities. There is a significant risk that the community’s bias towards it’s current code base (which still has work needed to service hyper-scale and enterprise data centers) will undermine progress in building suitable Edge IT solutions.

There are five significant ways that Edge is different than “traditional” datacenter. We often discuss this on our L8istSh9y podcast and it’s time to summarize them in a blog post.

IT infrastructure at the Edge is different than “edge” in general. Edge is often used as a superset of Internet of Things (IoT), personal devices (phones) and other emerging smart devices. Our interest here is not the devices but the services that are the next hop back supporting data storage, processing, aggregation and sharing. To scale, these services need to move from homes to controlled environments in shared locations like 5G towers, POP and regional data centers.

Unlike built-to-purpose edge devices, the edge infrastructure will be built on generic commodity hardware.

Here are five key ways that managing IT infrastructure at the edge is distinct from anything we’ve built so far:

Highly Distributed – Even at hyper-scale, we’re used to building cloud platforms in terms of tens of data centers; however, edge infrastructure sites will number in the thousands and millions! That’s distinct management sites, not servers or cores. Since the sites will not have homogeneous hardware specifications, the management of these sites requires zero-touch management that is vendor neutral, resilient and secure.

Low Latency Applications – Latency is the reason why Edge needs to be highly distributed. Edge applications like A/R, V/R, autonomous robotics and even voice controls interact with humans (and other apps) in ways that require microsecond response times. This speed of light limitation means that we cannot rely on hyper-scale data centers to consolidate infrastructure; instead, we have to push that infrastructure into the latency range of the users and devices.

Decentralized Data – A lot of data comes from all of these interactive edge devices. In our multi-vendor innovative market, data from each location could end up being sprayed all over the planet. Shared edge infrastructure provides an opportunity to aggregate this data locally where it can be shared and (maybe?) controlled. This is a very hard technical and business problem to solve. While it’s easy to inject blockchain as a possible solution, the actual requirements are still evolving.

Remote, In-Environment Infrastructure – To make matters even harder, the sites are not traditional raised floor data centers with 24×7 attendants: most will be small, remote and unstaffed sites that require a truck roll for services. Imagine an IT shed at the base of a vacant lot cell tower behind rusted chain link fences guarded by angry squirrels and monitored by underfunded FCC regulators.

Multi-Tenant and Trusted – Edge infrastructure will be a multi-tenant environment because it’s simple economics driving as-a-Service style resource sharing. Unlike buy-on-credit-card public clouds, the participants in the edge will have deeper, trusted relationships with the service providers. A high degree of trust is required because distributed application and data management must be coordinated between the Edge infrastructure manager and the application authors. This level of integration requires a deeper trust and inspect than current public clouds require.

These are hard problems! Solving them requires new thinking and tools that while cloud native in design, are not cloud tools. We should not expect to lift-and-shift cloud patterns directly into edge because the requirements are fundamentally different. This next wave of innovation requires building for an even more distributed and automated architecture.

I hope you’re as excited as we are about helping build infrastructure at the edge. What do you think the challenges are? We’d like to hear from you!

We are heading out to Vancouver next week for the OpenStack Summit from May 21 – 24. Rob Hirschfeld, our Co-Founder/CEO will be available to meet onsite as well as help drive the OpenStack community forward. If you are interested in meeting, please contact me.

Cloud Edge computing use cases range from IoT to VR/AR and any widely distributed application in between. However, taking OpenStack out of the data center requires an entirely new approach to security when there is far less ability to restrict access and often the applications require a shared tenant model.

Keeping up with patches has never been more critical. For hardware, that’s… hard. What if servers were deployed 100% ready to run without any need for remote configuration or access? What if we were able to roll a complete rebuild of an entire application stack from the BIOS up in minutes. Those are key concepts behind a cloud deployment pattern called “immutable infrastructure” because the servers are deployed from images produced by CI/CD process and destroyed after use instead of being reconfigured.

We’ll cover the specific process and it’s advantages. Then we’ll dive deeply into open tools and processes that make it possible to drive immutable images into your own infrastructure. The talk will include live demos and go discuss process and field challenges that attendees will likely face when they start implementation at home. We’ll also cover the significant security, time and cost benefits of this approach to make pitching the idea effective.

Note: OpenStack voting is limited to community members – if you registered by the deadline, you will receive your unique ballot by email. You have 8 votes to distribute as you see fit.

I believe open infrastructure software is essential for our IT future.

Open source has been a critical platform for innovation and creating commercial value for our entire industry; however, we have to deliberately foster communities for open source activities that connect creators, users and sponsors. OpenStack has built exactly that for people interested in infrastructure and that is why I am excited to run for the Foundation Board again.

OpenStack is at a critical juncture in transitioning from a code focus to a community focus.

We must allow the OpenStack code to consolidate around a simple mission while the community explores adjacent spaces. It will be a confusing and challenging transition because we’ll have to create new spaces that leave part of the code behind – what we’d call the Innovator’s Dilemma inside of a single company. And, I don’t think OpenStack has a lot of time to figure this out.

That change requires both strong and collaborative leadership by people who know the community but are not too immersed in the code.

I am seeking community support for my return to the OpenStack Foundation Board. In the two years since I was on the board, I’ve worked in the Kubernetes community to support operators. While on the board, I fought hard to deliver testable interoperability (DefCore) and against expanding the project focus (Big Tent). As a start-up and open source founder, I bring a critical commercial balance to a community that is too easily dominated by large vendor interests.

Re-elected or not, I’m a committed member of the OpenStack community who is enthusiastically supporting the new initiatives by the Foundation. I believe strongly that our industry needs to sponsor and support open infrastructure. I also believe that dominate place for OpenStack IaaS code has changed and we also need to focus those efforts to be highly collaborative.

OpenStack cannot keep starting with “use our code” – we have to start with “let’s understand the challenges.” That’s how we’ll keep building an strong open infrastructure community.

If these ideas resonate with you, then please consider supporting me for the OpenStack board. If they don’t, please vote anyway! There are great candidates on the ballot again and voting supports the community.